The Austin bomber was a white Christian. Ban them all!
Ihold this truth to be self-evident: If the dead Austin bomber had turned out to be a Muslim, Trump would be interrupting his current presidential duties to rail anew about the urgent need to thwart dangerous foreigners with walls and travel bans. But, alas, 23-year-old Michael Anthony Corditt “grew up as the quiet, socially awkward oldest child of a devout Christian family that held Bible study groups in their white clapboard house, where an American flag hangs from the front porch,” according to the New York Times. Corditt had semi-articulate right-wing positions on gay marriage (homosexuality is akin to bestiality — basically, the Rick Santorum stance), on abortion (“if we are going to give women free abortions, why not give men free condoms, or the like?”) and on the death penalty (he liked it). In his teens he joined a group called Righteous Invasion of Truth, a Bible study program for home-schooled kids interested in God and gun training. One friend said, “I know faith was a serious thing for him.”
I am not trying to imply that Corditt’s conservative Christian outlook inspired him to randomly kill and maim. At this point, it appears he was just another seriously screwed up white American — like the Las Vegas shooter, the Parkland shooter, the Texas First Baptist Church shooter (how quickly we forget), the Planned Parenthood shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, the Aurora movie theater shooter, Gabby Giffords’ shooter, many hundreds more, plus the math prodigy better known as the Unabomber.
But we all know that if Corditt’s surname had been Khan or Ahmed, if he’d been a fixture at the local mosque, and if he’d joined a Muslim equivalent of the Righteous Invasion of Truth, it’s a cinch bet that Trump would be currently indulging his white nativist ID.
The bomber’s Muslim faith would’ve been deemed sufficient evidence of radical violent intent. Trump would be citing the bomber’s pedigree as proof that we need to protect real Americans from the immigrant Other. He would be ranting anew for his border wall billions, for the defunding of sanctuary cities, he’d be tweeting anew for the travel ban that’s tied up in the courts, he’d be repeating the lie he uttered in December (that illegal immigrants bring “tremendous amounts of crime”), and he’d be referencing his recent State of the Union speech, where he drew fake connections between immigrants and crime. “Most tragically,” Trump said in that speech, foreigners in our midst “have caused the loss of many innocent lives.” We would never have known, listening to him, that immigrants on average commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens, and have a lower incarceration rate than native-born citizens.